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Ban On Louisiana Video Game Law Now Permanent
Carl Carlson writes "A Louisiana judge has issued a permanent injunction against a Louisiana law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. The law was crafted by video game dilettante Jack Thompson and took a slightly different approach to the issue of regulating video game sales. Rep. Roy Burrell (R) and Jack Thompson had research that purported to show a causative link between playing violent video games and real-world violence entered into the legislative record in an attempt to buttress the legislation's shaky credentials. In addition, the law adapted the Miller obscenity test to the realm of violent video games."
Not only is the Slashdot article misleading, but so is the Ars Technica article!
They make it sound like the ban was legit.
At this point Jack Thompson is making such a public ass of himself that its pushing the government to build some interesting techie legislation. I bet that the laws that are passed or banned now in response to Yack are going to provide some interesting obstacles for future laws that actually could have meant something.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Why should a judge even have to bother stopping this?Because your politicians have bought into Thompson's propaganda.
Am I the only one who thinks it odd that children can enjoy all the murder and mayhem that the entertainment industry can dump on them, but god forbid they should see a bare breast!
Is this part of a military conspiracy that wants them for cannon fodder, and fears that a healthy sex drive might make children avoid the latest Republican adventures overseas?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Cnn's Dr. Sanjay Gupta has a blog entry on a new study done by the American Academy of Pediatrics which says there is a correlation between violent video games and violent behavior.
From the article:
Unfortunately the post is pretty short on details and there are no links to the study. Interesting too that Dr. Gupta'a post was referring to 'children' but the tests were done on teenagers. I don't equate teenagers with children.
I never put much faith in the idea that voilent video games help make kids into killers until I read Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's book On Killing, which discusses in a systematic and well-referenced manner exactly what the armed forces have done since the Civil War to increase the firing rate of their infantrymen.
Firing rate? Contrary to what you may think of the typical Civil War battlefield, most soldiers did not fire their weapons. On a big field running with blood, cannons booming and everyone screaming, most soldiers would not fire a single shot. Battles would end with literally thousands upon thousands of loaded muskets on the ground. Fast forward to WWII, where we have the image of brave American soliders firing automatic weapons under terrible conditions. The nonfiring rate among infantrymen was 80-85%. Further, only 1% of airmen accounted for over 40% of all downed enemy aircraft. Most pilots did not shoot anyone down or even try to.
The Army decided to look into this. What they found out is that people generally don't want to kill anybody, and would often rather die themselves, even in battle when they are scared to death, than shoot someone. Not that the soldiers were cowards. On the contrary, the same soldiers that would not fire a shot would repeatedly take terrible risks to rescue a wounded comrad. But the Army wanted them to pull the trigger and hit something, and they figured out how. The only way someone that scared would be able to do anything in that situation is if they had been subject to operant conditioning. They would need to program the soldier's midbrain to fire the weapon, since the forebrain is no longer in use under that much stress. They began to make training as realistic as possible in terms of exposure to violence, and make the thought/action of killing part of a soldier's reflex, so that when the bullets started flying, the American soldier would respond.
It worked. During Korea the nonfiring rate among infantrymen dropped to 45%, and by Vietnam it was an amazing 5-10%, meaning that nearly every infantryman fired his weapon. The American infantryman had become a killer on the battlefield, and only later did the Army realize that fully 98% of soldiers who experience close combat and pull the trigger would be psychiatric casualties. The 2% that weren't mentally crippled are people who, outside the military, would be locked up.
The author makes an excellent study of how this sort of operant conditioning for violence exists outside the military, in movies and video games. Before you knee-jerk and say that violent video games have no impact on the children who play them hours and hours a day, and who then go watch violent movies and television on top of that, you should check out this book. It's hard to dismiss the data out of hand.
And as for religious texts such as the Bible or the Qur'an, the violence preached in them does condition people to behave violently, if these people read the words over and over and internalize them as fundamental truths. This is just what video games might be doing according to this author.
In the US, the complaint was solved by allowing soldiers to drink and smoke when off duty but at the base.
:p
Didn't really make anyone happy, but it put an end to the complaint
I've bought my 12 year old son loads of *18* games. Counterstrike was 18, so was BF2142 I think. Quake 4 was too old for him too apparently, but he has no problems.
On the other hand I rejected the GTA series as soon as I saw it.
It's called being sensible, it's not hard.
I was going to post in disagreement to this until I remembered that Hitler completed GTA in 12 hours, Charles Manson sat at #1 in the BF2 leaderboard for the best part of a year and Geoffery Dharma would play Doom 3 for days breaking only to chew on a foot. Or maybe that's bollocks and people were killing each other in a variety of gruesome ways for thousands of years before Computer Games and Cannibal Corpse came along.
OK, but this is reactionary conditioning...If being shot at in the middle of chaos, shoot back. It is about the "appropriate" reaction to a situation. Games like GTA (personally can't stand the game) rarely have what I consider to be realistic daily engagements. When was the last time you where doing a job for a mob boss and the FBI was chasing you? And if you where, then I have got some news for you, you are violent and it started before you played the game. Now if you asked if the games could desensitise you? I would agree that they can and probably do (especially as they get more realistic looking), but no more than the news media that goes out of its way to show the most horrific and graphic footage it can.